The Anatomy of Melancholy

What have they not made ordinary people believe? Things impossible in nature, things beyond belief! What devices, traditions and ceremonies have they not invented in every age to keep people obedient and enrich themselves? They profit from minds held captive by superstition, as Livy says.

Those ancient Egyptian priests took all sovereign power into their hands. Knowing, as Curtius suggests, that nothing rules a multitude more effectively than superstition; when captured by empty religion, even unruly women obey seers better than leaders—that ordinary people will obey priests sooner than captains, and nothing is more powerful than superstition, or better than blind zeal, for ruling a crowd—they so terrified and deceived them that the account is scarcely believable.

Almost every nation has been stupefied in this way. Among our Britons and the ancient Gauls the Druids have lorded it over people; the Magi in Persia; philosophers in Greece; Chaldeans among eastern peoples; Brahmans in India; gymnosophists in Ethiopia; the Turditanes in Spain; augurs in Rome; Apollo’s priests in Greece, the Phoebades and Pythonissae, through their oracles and apparitions; Amphiaraus and his companions; and now Muslim and pagan priests. What can they not accomplish? In what way do they not make fools of the world?

So everywhere, among all peoples and in all places, as Scaliger writes of Muslim priests, that tribe which ministers in sacred matters trims the people’s hopes to the dreams they themselves invent. So cunningly can they deceive ordinary people in every place and country.

But above all others, that high priest of Rome, the mother of that monstrous and superstitious brood, the bull-bellowing pope who now rages in the West, that three-headed Cerberus, has played his part. His religion today is pure policy: a state composed entirely of superstition and cunning, needing only cunning and superstition to maintain it. He uses colleges and religious houses as effectively as forts and castles, and accomplishes more today

through a company of scribbling parasites, fiery friars, zealous anchorites, hypocritical confessors, and those Praetorian soldiers, his Janissary Jesuits—that unsociable society, as Langius calls it, the Devil’s last effort and the excrement of the age—who now stand in the front line of battle, seek to monopolize and engross all other learning, and lord it over theology,

They alone receive the wounds of the whole war,